Mathematicians, Poets, Time and Becoming.

Roger Penrose Oct 2011 at the Science Festival in Genoa Italy

Whitehead's Drops of Experience and Bergson's understanding of Duration are ideas in what's subtitled Process Philosophy. The world, the universe and consciousness isn't one great big lump, expanding or otherwise, it's a happenstance that should be grasped as a moment by moment. Each moment appears, becomes real and then is gone. For Whitehead, who was a mathematician, the gone becomes available data. For Bergson, who was a Frenchman with the heart of a poet, the gone goes to memory where it remains in the consciousness, what Bergson thought of as a thickening of duration. For both men, whether it was a Drop of Experience, or a Thickening, the moment of appearance as it becomes real, this moment of coming into existence, is for Bergson, a creative moment, hence the title of one of his books, Creative Evolution. For Whitehead, this moment of coming into existence was unique, if you prefer, for Whitehead, it was a new number never before seen and therefore wonderful in every way.  Both men saw the past as an information set available to the moment of making real, and by real nowhere is there a suggestion that real refers to anything outside the minds capacity to perceive and interpret the world and its universe. Why do we care? Because a mathematician called Penrose has played with the math in a circular understanding of the entropy, the order and disorder within our expanding universe, and has addressed the possibility that as total entropy becomes increasingly random, disordered, everything cools down, no mass, a few black holes dotted around, a moment when time herself will slow. The question: Does time stop? Not really. According to Penrose, a mathematician with the soul of a poet, who's not afraid to use the English Language, when time slows to a point the Universe forgets what it is and in that moment of forgetting it becomes the beginning of the next universe. 

Baxter Becomes a Radical Feminist

Fungi of Somekind

Critics have had an issue with Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann Trial. The issue can be summed up by examining this question: Is a legal proceeding - where a judge and a jury hears evidence and arguments to resolve a civil or criminal dispute - a trial of an individual or a trial of society? The answer would include a contemplation of the question: Can a person be tried for the injustices and crimes of the society he or she belongs to? Just in case Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann Trial is a mystery to you, Eichmann was a mover and shaker in the industrialized genocide of, by some estimates, 10 to 15 million passive men, women and children of many different belief systems, colors and nationalities from all across Europe, which in 1942 at a conference just outside Berlin, that Eichmann attended, was officially titled: the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. In March of 1960 Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina, and in 1962 Adolf Eichmann was tried by a court in Jerusalem and hanged. Hannah Arendt's 1963 account of that trial is called: Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil. Hannah's critics, usually reluctant to dismiss Evil as Banal, can often assume the trial of one man can and should be a trial of the society the man on trial belongs to. Hannah's stand-alone point was that the apparatchiks gainfully engaged in the business of state do so unthinkingly. In other words Eichmann, in his trial, wasn't playing dumb, in obeying the edicts of his employer and his country he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. And if you're still interested I think you'd agree that the implications of Hannah's observations, if true, are intense. Society shapes people and the society we live in is our responsibility not theirs. Hannah's critics, it sometimes seems, would prefer to perceive evil as a universal enemy force hell bent on world domination. Those who have faith in the literal existence of evil can get sensitive when reluctantly returned to the embrace of Schopenhauer's restless, evil-free and irrational Will, where with no war to fight there's a sense of purposelessness or calm depending how close to death you are. Another, and rather crucial example of today's discussion with Baxter is a book by Ms Susan Brownmiller. Yes, it's her legal name, her birth name was Susan Warhaftig, which means truthful and honest and is of Yiddish origin, but she'd wanted a career in  acting  and Warhaftig didn't sound like a star of stage and screen this side of the Rhine Valley.  But for some reason the name Brownmiller did. Susan's book is called Against Our Will. Having lived in the wider world a good while the thesis she explores is that rape is not a crime of sex or lust, it's a conscious act of power and intimidation used by men to maintain social control of women. By social control, as opposed to control, Susan means those mechanisms within society that ensure individuals conform to norms that maintain order. These mechanisms have been tickling Baxter's fancy since we mentioned Dr. Marilynn Brewer's 'Choice Behavior in Social Dilemmas,' a subject matter that has persuaded Baxter to take a less active role in his relationship with our Spleen, he's agreed to nod politely instead of yelling and accusing our Spleen of suffering from an aggravated mythomaniacal pathology. Either way Brownmiller's most succinct remark on the issue that has so dramatically reawakened Baxter's interest in Brewer's 'Choice Behaviors' is this : "rape.... is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." Granted Susan might not have shared Schopenhauer's understanding of Will, but her point was to reframe the understandings of rape so that they included the notion that the act of rape held within it the idea of a "brutal violation of female autonomy" about which, for the benefit of women in our society, Brownmiller insisted something had to be done and could be done, rather than being dismissed as a 'dear little thing.'  Many a personage fell to outrage at the sound of Brownmiller's words. They saw it as a radical critique of boys, men and grandfathers. They dismissed Brownmiller's history lesson as a long gone problem of the past, her detailed historical and cultural exploration of the legal understandings of rape through the centuries that saw rape as a crime against a man's property, even if it was ever true, now that men had walked on the moon couldn't possible still be true. Yes indeed, Brownmiller's challenge caused angst and upset in the ranks of the masculine as defined by a culture that also includes a washing powder which cleans the sheets, pillow cases and towels whiter than white. Radical which comes from the word root, contains the meaning fundamental or basic. Feminist which comes from the word feminine, with an -ist at the end, contains the meaning, practitioner of, expert in, advocate for, follower of.  

The Uniqueness of No-group or becoming a Potted Plant

Oxalis Bloom

The word Positive is fraught. In the 1300's its meaning was firmly on the side of a legal understandings, formally laid out, decreed by authority, if it was positive, it was there to be obeyed. The point is, "decreed by authority" doesn't or shouldn't mean good and it doesn't or shouldn't mean bad. So, when you ask the question "what does Positive Distinctiveness" mean, one answer might include the suggestion that positive, in this context, is better understood as the opposite to negative rather than as a value judgement on the condition of meaning in the word distinctiveness. In almost every way, social psychologist's who use the expression drive for positive distinctiveness would be better off placing this urgent need or tension that motivates a social being firmly within the meaning of the words Optimal Distinctiveness. And, joy of joys, in 1991 Marilynn Brewer, a great name, put the pin into Social Identity Theory, with its Positive Distinctiveness, by flaunting her Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. A theory which said there's much more to the 1979 Positive Distinctiveness theory of social Identity than was first admitted to. Dr. Marilynn Brewer, whose argument through most of her work in social psychology, a body of work that includes titles such as "Choice Behavior in Social Dilemmas" which is a big one for me, offers a window into the idea that our identities are shaped by our group membership. She suggests that an individual's identity within a society isn't just a drive for Positive Distinctiveness. No, the motivating tension, the urgent need, the drive is about being Optimally Unique. Of course Marilynn, and this is just typical, didn't mean wonderfully unique and special, she defined Optimal as a unique balancing point which in Distinctiveness Theory meant possessing just the right amount of being someone in the group without being nobody in the group. This balance allows the person to fit comfortably enough into the group to maintain a lonely belonging that was never actually going to be the complete person. And here it might be well worthwhile taking a moment to remember that in the social psychology of groups the wider meaning of Optimal Distinctiveness includes the meanings of leadership and followership.  It's all very accurate I'm sure, but, even when you recover from the daintiness of the word followership, the exploration isn't a pretty commentary on the independent mindedness of us people. Makes some of us yearn to become a hedgehog, a spitting cobra, or even one of Arthur Schopenhauer's poodles instead of a sheep. Social Psychologists, as well as owning an approach to understanding optimal value in the balance between Us and Me, interesting ideas on the extent to which membership of a group is predicted to reduce social uncertainty and apparently provide a psychologically comforting blueprint for behavior, not to mention a road map for both self evaluation and for the evaluation of other possibly less wholesome group members. These, perfectly acceptable and arguably vital demands from the imperatives for social cohesion are pretty much everything Arthur Schopenhauer disliked about the world of people he lived in. Is it fair to ask, I wonder, whether Arthur's "choice behaviors" or how he managed attitudes and behaviors in social situations that presented him with a dilemma, were positively or negatively influenced by contact with society. After all we do have the great comfort of Arthur's assertion that Will is the manifestation of a primal force that is "blind, irrational, aimless and incessantly striving," which, without tossing a seamstress downstairs, is somehow more encouraging than the Calvinist potted plant notion that the "Will is in bondage to a sinful disposition."

Knowledge and Truth

Wash Day

Epistemology is the word used to embrace theories associated with the nature, origins and limits of knowledge. What is knowledge? By one definition knowledge is a Justified True Belief, a JTB. The question, what is belief? One answer is this: Belief is Propositional Attitude. A proposition is a statement that can be either true or false, the attitude is whether you believe the statement is true or whether you believe the statement is false and when the definition of Knowledge holds firm and is reflected in reality you can justify the truth or falseness of the proposition. It's a lot of words for something that would be obvious if it weren't for the truth or otherwise of the proposition: there are a bunch of other things an understanding of belief needs to take into account before reaching a conclusion. Here the next category of contemplation comes under the title of psychology and cognition. Belief is a mental acceptance that gives shape to the world we live in. This shape allows us to navigate our world according to our belief systems and gives us a basis upon which to interpret new information. It makes our mental life possible. Worth noting that much of what we believe is lodged in more distant parts of the mind, we don't have to concentrate too hard on a majority of our mind-to-world connections for them to work. Things like waking up in our own bed and having confidence the staircase is where we last saw it. A third area in the contemplation of belief is the extent to which belief is active, as opposed to passive. An example of this, those of us with dispositions to leave nothing to chance, might become a little obsessive about wearing clean underwear every day in the event of a hospitalization or a romantic interlude, others shrug away these sort of pointless gestures and hold fast to the inevitability of disappointment. Then you have nuances within the word belief. Justified or not you have a belief in, a trust and faith in something being true because wouldn't it be nice of there was a fruitcake in the mail. And you can have a belief that a proposition is true, of course they fill doughnuts with strawberry jam and Vegemite, everyone knows that. So there you have it, I'd call it a serviceable End of The Enlightenment that Heralds the Dawn of Post Irony Critique of Pure Reason. And again I'll ask why has our frail, toothless, non-tree-climbing species evolved in this rich and magnificent, incredibly dangerous and cruel-hearted manner. My own answer is less to do with "it'll be over soon" and more to do with Arendt's expression Spontaneous Beginnings. Go ahead call it a big bang god with absolutely no plan, no design, a randomness containing an open mouthed, wide-eyed expression that screams. Or you can be good to yourself by putting it in the context of the respected yet anti-social Schopenhauer's irrational restlessness. You can make it up as you navigate your way to the Rapture and when you believe it, true or not, it becomes knowledge. Truth isn't an invincible oneness, it's not a Genghis Khan, nor is it putting man on Mars or nailing him to a cross. Truth is no closed doors, it's hallowed ground, it's a little bit of everything and a sense of calm.